For Chinese, Crew Release Marks Beginning, Not End

For most Americans, freedom for the crew of a U.S. spy plane marooned in China marked the end of a long, tense diplomatic standoff between Beijing and Washington.

For most Chinese, the work is just beginning.

That’s how the Chinese government Thursday cast the outcome of the 11-day dispute that strained already brittle ties between the world’s sole superpower and its foremost rising power.

Even as China’s state media were selling the result of the confrontation as a victory over the United States, Beijing made it clear that it will not let rest the Apr. 1 collision that forced the U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane to land in southern China and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet to crash into the sea.

Officials said the next act in the diplomatic drama will begin Wednesday at a Sino-U.S. meeting to discuss the midair accident. Beijing plans to repeat its demand that the U.S. military stop intelligence-gathering flights off the Chinese coast, which the Communist regime deems provocative.

The right to publicly air that grievance, one Western analyst said, may have been the most important concession that the Chinese government -- and particularly the military -- wrung from Washington to end the standoff, beyond U.S. statements of being “very sorry” for the likely death of the fighter pilot.

China will have a platform from which to assert what it sees as its territorial rights to the South China Sea and the airspace above it.

“Now the U.S. side will be dragged into endless discussions with the Chinese side about Chinese waters,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China. “They’ll bring it up again and again, and then again.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell seemed to resign himself to such Chinese demands.

“This is not over,” Powell acknowledged Wednesday amid meetings on the Balkans in Paris. “Some discussions will begin, and we still have our (stranded) plane there (in southern China). ... This will all unfold in the days and weeks ahead.”

Spy missions such as the one the U.S. Navy aircraft was on when it collided with the Chinese fighter are extremely irksome to Beijing. But the Communist regime, including China’s politically powerful army generals, will probably be disappointed by the U.S. response. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the surveillance flights in Asia are important to preserving U.S. interests and peace in the region.

Nonetheless, Beijing portrayed its settlement with the United States over the midair collision as an unalloyed success. The state media described Washington’s expressions of regret as the apology that the Chinese government had demanded, although the Bush administration insists it was no such thing.

An editorial in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, called on residents to harness the passion they showed over the standoff and apply it to building China’s future. “Turn patriotism into national strength,” the newspaper said.